Despite her enthusiasm for her web-only project, The Daily Beast, Brown hasn’t been able to keep up with the very media landscape she helped to create. We’re living in the high era of buzz […] (Now you build this person up! Now you tear her down!), and, arguably, the low-level chatter about stories has overtaken the stories themselves. To get their attention, Brown’s been forced to resort to what all those chatterers have labeled trolling (though, to her credit, often of a particularly imaginative bent): the Michelle Bachmann eyes, the gay Obama cover, the ghost of Princess Di, the Heaven Is Real argument. If they look like moves of desperation that’s because, well, they are. Former employees say that Brown had, quite clearly, lost her confidence. Many of her editorial decisions look more like catchup than agenda-setting: her recent efforts to amp up coverage of philanthropy, politics, and feminism seem driven more by her rivalry with Arianna Huffington than by any particular moral or intellectual imperatives. According to a former employee and Brown fan, “Tina didn’t have good concepts by the end, so she just started attacking public figures.”

This is my Esquire cover of spring 1968, before Tricky Dick was nominated for president. My composite shot was a satirical comment on the 1960 TV debates, when the Whittier Wiz lost to the handsome John F. Kennedy by a five o’clock shadow because he looked evil on America’s screens. I located this profile shot (Nixon getting shut eye on a plane) and we photographed the hands of four makeup artists, including the guy wielding the lipstick. The day it hit the newsstands, editor Harold Hayes got a phone call from some stiff on Nixon’s staff. He was miffed. In fact, he was incensed. You know why? The lipstick. He said it was an attack on his boss’s masculinity. He screamed, ”Showing Richard Nixon as a flaming queen is outrageous. If he becomes president, Esquire had better watch out!,” and hung up.